Digital Rights Management (DRM) techniques are used by publishers to protect, distribute, track and manage user rights for digital content. The digital content can be in the form of documents, e-books, audio, video, games, images etc. DRM controls the access of sensitive content by including information about the user rights (i.e., permissions, constraints, and obligations) associated with that content. It involves cryptographic techniques and access control mechanisms for preventing unauthorized access; and control usage of content.
The web content can consist of html, images, flash and active documents such as PDF. In a conventional DRM product, URLs to access the protected content has to use the protocol names such as rmfile (for local files) and rmhttp (for remote content). But in the case of mixed content, part of the content may have to be in plain format and part of it needs to be protected. In that case the proprietary protocols may not be able to interpret them. Many DRM solutions do not provide a uniform framework for the protection of multiple content types such as html, flash, digital media and executables with in a web page. Hence, the overall applicability of the present DRM solutions for web content is limited. In some DRM systems key management is an issue. The decryption keys may have to be stored locally to render the protected content.
Accordingly a uniform framework is required for the protection of multiple content types such as html, flash, digital media and executables with in a web page.